Modeling of Light and Carbon Dioxide Concentration in Energetic Dark Greenhouse (EDG)

Food systems face escalating challenges, driven by the pressures of a changing climate, resource scarcity, and limited arable land, putting our capacity to feed the growing global population at risk. In the face of these constraints, there is a critical need for advanced technologies that enhance food security while mitigating the environmental impact associated with modern agriculture. Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) emerges as a promising cutting-edge technology capable of intensifying food production in an environmentally sustainable manner. In the context of this paper, Controlled Environment Agriculture involves cultivating crops in vertically stacked hydroponic beds under exclusive LED lighting within a controlled environment, encompassing vertical farms or plant factories. Such systems have the potential to yield significantly higher crop volumes using a fraction of the land, water, and nutrients compared to conventional field agriculture or even greenhouse production. In this research, a solution is proposed to create sustainable security in the four interconnected dimensions of water, environment, food, and energy, with a volumetric perspective. This solution is a kind of CEA with emphasis on energy security, as well as food and water security and environment preservation. this solution called “Energetic Dark Greenhouse,” which is a closed and controlled engineering system for agricultural production. In this study, a mathematical model is presented for artificial lighting and the required concentration of carbon dioxide for plant growth, and practical experimental results in the Energetic Dark Greenhouse validate this model. In the conducted experiment, the effect of light intensity and carbon dioxide concentration on plant growth is examined, and suitable values for these parameters are suggested. It can be concluded that the appropriate light treatment for this type of plant (leafy vegetables) is about $14\left(\mu \mathrm{mol}. \mathrm{m}^{-2} \cdot \mathrm{d}^{-1}\right)$. Furthermore, the research revealed that due to the substitution of artificial light containing only the visible spectrum, water consumption in Energetic Dark Greenhouse has been reduced by approximately 90% compared to traditional greenhouses.